Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September
1929–10 June 2003) was an English moral philosopher, described by The
Times as the "most brilliant and most important British moral
philosopher of his time".[1]
His publications include Problems of the Self (1973),
Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy (1985), and Truth And Truthfulness: An Essay In
Genealogy (2002).

As Knightbridge Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch
Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley,
Williams became known internationally for his attempt to reorient
the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and
psychology, and, in particular, to the Greeks.[2]
Described as an "analytic philosopher with the soul of a
humanist",[3]
he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields
that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He
rejected scientific and evolutionary reductionism, calling "morally
unimaginative" reductionists, "the people I really do dislike".[4] For
Williams, complexity was irreducible, beautiful, and
meaningful.

He became known as a supporter of women in academia,[5]
seeing in women the possibility of a synthesis of reason and
emotion that he felt eluded analytic philosophy. The American
philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, said he was "as close
to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could
be".[5]
He was also famously sharp in conversation. Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle once
said of him that he "understands what you're going to say better
than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible
objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible
objections, before you've got to the end of your sentence".[6]

Career

Williams spent nearly 20 years at Cambridge, eight of them as
Provost of King's.

Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political
ambitions, finding a post first at University College London,
where he worked from 1959 until 1964, then was elected Professor of
Philosophy at Bedford College, while his wife
worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17
years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary
Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as
one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter,
Rebecca, but the development of his wife's political career kept
the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal
values—Williams was a confirmed atheist, his wife a devout Catholic—placed a strain on their
relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an
affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin
Skinner. The marriage was dissolved in 1974, and Williams and
Skinner subsequently married, a marriage that produced two
sons.[6]
Shirley Williams said of their marriage:

... [T]here was something of a strain that comes from two
things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were
respectively doing—we didn't spend all that much time together; the
other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly unjudgmental and
I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people
he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer
than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful
sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind
are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not
judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say
"That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point." So we
had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism.[6]

Williams conceded that he could be tough. "I like to think that
this is usually when I'm confronted with self-satisfaction. In
philosophy the thing that irritates me is smugness, particularly
scientistic smugness."[6]
He was appointed Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge
in 1967, vacating the chair to serve as Provost of King's College
from 1979 until 1987.[1]
He left England in 1988 to become Deutsch Professor of Philosophy
at the University of
California, Berkeley, citing the relative prosperity of
American academic life, and the so-called "brain drain" from
England of academics moving to the U.S. He told a British newspaper
at the time that he could barely afford to buy a house in central
London on his salary as an academic. He told The Guardian
in November 2002 that he regretted his departure becoming so
public: "I was persuaded that there was a real problem about
academic conditions and that if my departure was publicized this
would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it
made me seem narky, and when I came back again in three years it
looked rather absurd. I came back for personal reasons—it's harder
to live out there with a family than I supposed."[6]

Later in life, he held positions at Berkeley (1986-2003) where
he was Mills Professor (1986-1988), Sather Classics Lecturer and
Sather Professor (1988-1989),[7] and
Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy (1988–2003),[8] and
also served, at the same time, as White's Professor of Moral
Philosophy at Oxford (1990–1996), eventually becoming a Fellow of
All Souls College again in 1997.[6]

Royal
commissions

In addition to academic life, Williams chaired and served on a
number of royal commissions and government
committees. In the 1970s, he chaired the Committee on
Obscenity and Film Censorship, which reported in 1979 that:
"Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and
the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that
one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any
hint at all that pornography was present in the
background."[2]
The Committee's report was evidently influenced by the liberal
thinking of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher
greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill's principle of liberty
to develop what he called the "harm condition", whereby "no conduct
should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm
someone".[6]

Williams concluded that pornography could not be shown to be
harmful and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is
not very important ... to think anything else is to get the
problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other
problems that face our society today." The committee reported that,
so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be
free to read and watch pornography as they saw fit.[6]
Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining the
role of gambling, drug abuse, and private schools. "I did all the
major vices", he said.[1]

He died on 10 June 2003 while on holiday in Rome. He had been
suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. He
was survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, and a daughter
from his first marriage.[1]

Work

Approach to moral
philosophy

In Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he wrote
that "whereas most moral philosophy at most times has been empty
and boring... contemporary moral philosophy has found an original
way of being boring, which is by not discussing issues at all." The
study of morality, he argued, should be vital and compelling. He
wanted to find a moral philosophy that was accountable to
psychology, history, politics, and culture. In his rejection of
morality as what he called "a peculiar institution", by which he
meant a discrete and separable domain of human thought, some people
have seen a resemblance to the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche although, on the face of it, Nietzsche was quite the
opposite, complaining, at the very end of Ecce Homo, that
"in the concept of the good man, common cause [is] made with
everything weak, sick, ill-constituted, suffering from itself".
Despite at first seeing the German philosopher as a crude
reductionist, Williams came to greatly admire Nietzsche, once
remarking that he wished he could quote him every twenty
minutes.[10]

Although Williams's disdain for reductionism could make him
appear a moral
relativist, he argued in Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy that moral concepts could be "thick" or "thin".
The former—such as courageous or cruel—are about real features of
the world to the extent that they count as "knowledge", and
disputes about them can be resolved objectively.[10]

Critique of
utilitarianism

Williams was particularly critical of utilitarianism, a consequentialist theory, the simplest
version of which argues that actions are good only insofar as they
promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number (regardless
of the distribution). One of his best-known arguments against
utilitarianism centers on Jim, a botanist doing research in a South
American country led by a brutal dictator. One day, Jim finds
himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 Indians who
have been randomly captured and tied up as examples of what will
happen to rebels. The captain who has arrested the Indians says
that if Jim will kill one of them, the others will be released in
honor of Jim's status as a guest; if he does not, all the Indians
will be killed.[13]

For most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in
a case like this; all that matters is the outcome. Simple act
utilitarianism would therefore favour Jim killing one of the
men. Against this, Williams argued that there is a crucial moral
distinction between a person being killed by me, and being killed
by someone else because of an act or omission of mine. The
utilitarian loses that vital distinction, turning us into empty
vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than
preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers. Moral
decisions must preserve our psychological
identity and integrity, he argued.[13]

He argued that we do not, in fact, judge actions by their
consequences. To solve parking problems in London, a utilitarian
would have to favour threatening to shoot people who parked
illegally. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking
would soon stop; thus the utilitarian calculus could justify the
shootings by the happiness the absence of parking problems would
bring. Any theory with this as a consequence, Williams argued,
should be rejected out of hand, no matter how plausible it feels to
argue that we do judge actions by their consequences. In an effort
to save the utilitarian account, a rule utilitarianism—a version of
utilitarianism that promotes not the act, but the rule that tends
to lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number—would ask
what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. If the
rule were: "Anyone might be shot over a simple parking offense,"
the utilitarian would argue that its implementation would bring
great unhappiness. For Williams, this argument simply proved his
point. We do not need to calculate why threatening to shoot people
over parking offenses is wrong, he argued, and any system that
shows us how to make the calculation is one we should reject.
Indeed, we should reject any system that reduces moral
decision-making to a few algorithms, because any systematization or
reductionism will inevitably distort its complexity.[14][15]

Critique
of Kantianism

One of the main alternatives to utilitarian theory is the moral
philosophy of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Williams's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s outlined the basis
of his attacks on the twin pillars of utilitarianism and
Kantianism.[16]
Martha Nussbaum wrote that his work "denounced the trivial and
evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in
England under the aegis of those two dominant theories".[5]

Kant's Critique of Practical
Reason and Groundwork for the Metaphysic of
Morals expounded a moral system based on what he called
the categorical imperative, the best
known version of which is: "Act as if the maxim of your action were
to become, by an act of will, a universal law of nature."
This is a binding law, Kant argued, on any rational being with free will. Williams argued against the
categorical imperative in his paper "Persons, character and
morality". Morality should not require us to act selflessly, as
though we are not who we are in the circumstances in which we
presently find ourselves. We should not have to take an impartial
view of the world, he argued. Our values, commitments, and desires
do make a difference to how we see the world and how we act; and so
they should, he said, otherwise we lose our individuality, and
thereby our humanity.[17]

Reasons for
action

Williams's insistence that morality is about people and their
real lives, and that acting out of self-interest and even selfishness are not
contrary to moral action, is illustrated in his "internal reasons
for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the
"internal/external reasons" debate.[18]

Philosophers have tried to argue that moral agents can have
"external reasons" for performing a moral act; that is, they are
able to act for reasons external to their inner mental states.
Williams argued that this is meaningless. For something to be a
"reason to act", it must be "magnetic"; that is, it must move
people to action. But how can something entirely external to us—for
example, the proposition that X is good—be "magnetic"?
By what process can something external to us move us to act?[18]

Williams argued that it cannot. Cognition is not magnetic. Knowing and
feeling are quite separate, he wrote, and a person must feel before
they are moved to act. He argued that reasons for action are always
internal, whether based on a desire to act in accordance with
upbringing, peer pressure, or similar, and they always boil down to
desire.[18]

Truth

In his final completed book, Truth And Truthfulness: An
Essay In Genealogy (2002), Williams identifies the two basic
values of truth as accuracy and sincerity, and tries to address the
gulf between the demand for truth, and the doubt that any such
thing exists. The debt to Nietzsche is clear, most obviously in the
adoption of a genealogical method as a tool of
explanation and critique. Although part of his intention was to
attack those he felt denied the value of truth, the book cautions
that to understand it simply in that sense would be to miss part of
its purpose; rather, as Kenneth Baker wrote, it is "Williams'
reflection on the moral cost of the intellectual vogue for
dispensing with the concept of truth".[9]The Guardian wrote in its obituary of Williams that the
book is an examination of those who "sneer at any purported truth
as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power,
class bias and ideology".[10]

Posthumous
works

Since Williams's death, several collections of his essays,
articles, and transcripts of lectures have been published. In
the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political
Argument (2005), on political philosophy; The Sense of the
Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (2006), essays on
the boundaries between philosophy and history; Philosophy as a
Humanistic Discipline (2006), on metaphysics, epistemology,
and ethics; and On Opera (2006).[19][20]

Legacy

Williams did not propose any systematic philosophical theory;
indeed, he was suspicious of any such attempt. Alan Thomas writes
that Williams's contribution to ethics was an overarching scepticism about attempts to create a
foundation to moral philosophy, explicitly articulated in
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame
and Necessity (1993), where he argued that moral theories can
never reflect the complexities of life, particularly given the
radical pluralism of modern societies.[21]Jonathan Lear
writes that Williams wanted to understand human beings as part of
the natural world,[22] and
that the fundamental starting point of moral reflection had to be
the individual perspective, the internal reasons for action. To try
to transcend one's point of view, Williams argued, leads only to
self-deception.[19]

In a secular humanist tradition, with no
appeal to the external moral authority of a god, his ideas strike
at the foundation of conventional morality, namely that one
sometimes does good even if one does not want to, and can be blamed
for a failure to do so. Timothy Chappell writes that, without
external reasons for action, it becomes impossible to argue that
the same set of moral reasons applies to all agents equally,
because an agent's reasons can always be relativized to their
particular lives, their internal reasons.[15]
In cases where someone has no internal reason to do what others see
as the right thing, they cannot be blamed for failing to do it,
because internal reasons are the only reasons, and blame, Williams
wrote, "involves treating the person who is blamed like someone who
had a reason to do the right thing but did not do it."[23]

Chappell writes that learning to be yourself, to be authentic
and to act with integrity, rather than conforming to any external
moral system, is arguably the fundamental motif of Williams's work.[15]
"If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and
self-expression," Williams said in 2002. "It's the idea that some
things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and
others aren't ... The whole thing has been about spelling out the
notion of inner necessity."[6]
He moved moral philosophy away from the Kantian question, "What is
my duty?" and back to the issue that mattered to the Greeks: "How
should we live?"[5]

Publications

Books

Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge
University Press, 1972.

^
Baker 2002: "The people I really do dislike are the morally
unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who in the name of
science think they can explain everything in terms of our early
hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of
high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive
speculation encourages a really empty scientism."

^Morality: An Introduction to Ethics in 1972; Problems
of the Self in 1973; Utilitarianism: For and Against
with J.J.C. Smart, also in 1973; Moral Luck in 1981; and
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy in 1985